In a previous post we established that SAT Words Are Everywhere by pulling quotes off the front page of Google news and pointing out the SAT vocabulary words in them that you never knew where there.

Today, we take you into the mind of an SAT test writer to show you that SAT questions are everywhere as well. We’ll go step by step through the process of creating an SAT sentence completion question to give you some insight into how to approach this type of question.

SAT sentence-completion questions typically come from the mass media or literature. So, let’s say that our SAT test writer reads the following on Google news:

Her eyes light up! This sentence contains several elements for making a great sentence completion question:

• The reading level is appropriate. It’s complex, but not overly difficult.

• The average high school student on a college-prep track should have an idea of what martial law is. He’s not going to know exactly, but he will have heard of it.

• It has a couple of good vocabulary words in it, like alleged and quell.

• And, saving the best for last, the sentence is in the form “Not A but B”: The decision is “not an overreaction…but is ‘necessary’….” This structure, in which the first part of the sentence contrasts the second part, requires some reasoning to make sense of. And remember, reasoning is precisely what the SAT tests.

Step One: Making It Generic

The first step in transforming this bit of mass media into an SAT question is to make it generic. Our fictional SAT test writer knows that nothing in the test should offend anyone, so she is going to take out any characteristics that can tie this sentence to any one place:

Supporters claimed that the president’s decision to declare martial law was not an overreaction, but was necessary to quell a rebellion.

Step Two: Decide on the Type of Question

Our test writer has many options for transforming our new sentence into a test question. The most straightforward type of question she could write is a one-blank vocabulary question:

Supporters claimed that the president’s decision to declare martial law was not an overreaction, but was necessary to _______ a rebellion.

A) expand B) induce C) instigate D) undo E) quell

Without understanding much else about the sentence most students know that a president views a rebellion as a bad thing that needs to be stopped. So A and B are easy answers to eliminate (assuming you know that induce means to cause).

Our test writer then inserts instigate to make things a little harder. The average student kind of knows that word, maybe has heard it before as in someone “instigated a fight,” and could probably eliminate it as an answer choice.

The evil test writer deliberately puts in the next answer choice to weed out the men from the boys (or the women from the girls). Beware of it! It’s the word you know that by some sort of fuzzy logic kind of fits. It makes you think, “The president would want to stop a rebellion, undo kind of means to stop AND I DON’T KNOW THE MEANING OF THE WORD QUELL. Undo it is!” But remember, the SAT is a test of logical reasoning. If your logic is fuzzy to make the word fit, it’s wrong.

Which leads to Tip One: if you get the answer down to two choices, between a word that uses fuzzy logic to fit and a word you don’t know, pick the word you don’t know.

Next time, we’ll take a look at sentence structure and how the test writer justifies the right answer.

“Where do they get these words?”

“I’ve never seen that word in my life!”

“Is this even English?”

“How will I ever learn all these words in time for the test?”

Students typically think that the makers of the SAT scrape the bottom of the English-language barrel to find the most difficult, archaic (ooh, there’s an SAT word; it means old-fashioned) words they can to make test-takers’ lives miserable. But that’s not really the case. It only seems like it.

Most of us have a reading vocabulary that is far larger than our spoken vocabulary. When we see words in context, we can infer (oops, there’s another one; it means deduce or conclude) a meaning of the word, or at least the main point of what we’re reading without knowing a specific definition of each word in the sentence.

If you read a lot, you see the “difficult” words more frequently until eventually they become a part of your spoken, or conscious, vocabulary. If you don’t read a lot, you tend to skim over the difficult words, they don’t stick in your head, and you think you’ve never seen them before.

To prove my point, I randomly skimmed a couple of days of Google news, a news source that is not particularly difficult or specialized, and one you’ve probably read (and understood!) yourself. I quickly found five samples of writing that contains SAT words:

The idea behind the verbal portion of the SAT is to reward people who make a habit of reading, who thereby have a bigger vocabulary, and who then will be better able to tackle college-level reading.

At this point, you’ve either been a lifelong reader or you haven’t. Either way, you can still Speed Prep for the vocabulary on the SAT by starting to pay attention to the printed words around you in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet.

Read on-line newspaper articles or go to the library and pull a stack of Time or Newsweek magazines and begin to skim them for “big” words. Make an effort to understand the words in context and jot down the ones you can’t figure out on note cards to look up. Soon you will have your own set of flashcards of SAT words that will have significance to you. This approach to studying vocabulary will help you retain the words better than studying random vocab lists. And it has the added benefits of helping you review sentence structure, another SAT biggie, as well as perhaps offering you some examples of current events that can be used in your essay.

As for our examples above, check the Weekly Challenge in our Forum over the next several weeks after you’ve tried figuring out the meanings of the words in red. We are going to analyze each sample, take them apart, and turn them into SAT questions to show you how it’s done. Remember, Speed Preppers, we are in training not just to cram a bunch of random information into our heads, but to learn to think the way that the SAT rewards.

Students often ask, “What is the single most important thing I can study to improve my score on the SAT?”

Well, if you only have the time to study one thing, study geometry. Plain and simple geometry: lines and angles; properties of circles, squares and triangles; areas, perimeters and volumes; properties of cubes.

The SAT math section is comprised of about 30% geometry. And even better, there are no proofs, no calculus, no trigonometry, just the plain and simple geometry you’ve been learning since elementary school.

But this is not to say that the geometry on the SAT is easy. Remember, the SAT is a “reasoning” test, not an achievement test, and geometry is all about reasoning. For over 2,000 years, geometry has been studied not only for the practical understanding of the math, but also to improve the student’s reasoning abilities. Why do you have to study math that you’re likely to never use again? Because it demands logic and a rigorous thought process–mental aerobics, if you will.

The Bible of geometry and the cornerstone of a classical education is Euclid’s 13-volume, comprehensive geometry text, The Elements. Euclid lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt, around 300 B.C. In The Elements, he compiled the knowledge of geometry of great thinkers of his time, including Plato and Pythagoras. Euclid’s Elements was commonly used as a geometry text up until the twentieth century. It is second only to the Bible in number of copies printed, and it was a fundamental part of the education of the founding fathers of this country.

Abraham Lincoln tackled The Elements in his 40s after he lost his first election to improve his reasoning skills and become a better lawyer. Euclid’s axioms–or statements whose truth is self-evident–shaped his thinking and were reflected in his speeches as he later found himself trying to hold the country together, perhaps most importantly, the axiom that “The whole is greater than the part.”

The central philosophy of The Elements is reflected in the SAT: build upon given information to come to unique conclusions. So study your geometry principles and learn the formulas associated with squares and rectangles, circles, and triangles. These are the building blocks of reasoning that you’ll need for the geometry on the SAT.

References

McCoy, Drew R. An “Old-Fashioned” Nationalism: Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Classical Tradition. University of Illinois Press: 2004. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/23.1/mccoy.html

Page, John. Euclid. 2009. http://www.mathopenref.com/euclid.html

We are frequently asked whether or not studying for the SAT can make that much difference on your score. “Isn’t the SAT more of an intelligence test?”students often ask. No, it’s not. In fact, do you know what the acronym “SAT” stands for? According to the College Board, which administers the SAT, it stands for nothing. That’s right, nothing. A look at how this came to be will give you some insight into what you’re really up against on the SAT.

The first SAT,  the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” was administered in 1926.  It had been adapted by a Princeton professor from an IQ test first given to US Army recruits during WWI, when the entire concept of IQ testing was still new. The test was later adopted by Harvard University as a way to identify potential scholarship students who did not come from Harvard’s traditional student base of upper-class Eastern boarding schools. By 1942, the College Board had adopted the SAT as the single test it administered for all college applicants. The key word in this version of the acronym SAT is aptitude—by definition an ability you are born with, a discrete, innate quality that cannot be fundamentally changed, like your hair color or eye color.  By extension, aptitude cannot be taught.

But throughout the 1970s-80s, one-size-fits-all IQ tests were beginning to fall out of favor as people began to recognize inherent biases in the tests and the fact that successful people can have different types of intelligence and performance styles. Furthermore, evidence that the SAT predicts college success is sketchy, at best, even by the College Board’s own admission. Studies have shown anywhere from a 6% to 25% correlation between SAT test scores and first-year college grades. The poor reliability of SAT scores to predict college grades drops off even further after the freshman year and further still in predicting who will eventually graduate. And perhaps the most damning evidence against the SAT’s measure of “aptitude” came in the success of the myriad test-prep companies that sprang up to coach students to higher scores on the test. If aptitude really is an innate quality, how could it be taught?

Seeking to defend their multi-million dollar monopoly on a college admission test whose merits could not really be pinned down, the College Board renamed the test in 1990, and the Scholastic Aptitude Test became the Scholastic Assessment Test, an implicit acknowledgment that the test had never measured aptitude all along. Same acronym, same dodgy test, different name.

Still facing criticism that the name did not aptly describe the test, in 1994, the College Board changed the name again: this time SAT wasn’t an acronym for anything. Sort of like “KFC”—if you’re catching flak because time has shown that fried foods are unhealthy, don’t change the food, just change the name. Maybe no one will notice.

Perhaps the irony of an acronym that stands for nothing as the name of a test that basically predicts nothing became apparent to the College Board, because in 2005, the name of the test was changed yet again to the SAT Reasoning Test. The “SAT” part still doesn’t stand for anything.

In the absence of scientific evidence of what the SAT actually measures and growing criticism from students and universities of the high value placed on a single test, Wayne Camara, head of College Board’s Office of Research, has described the test thus:

It’s not an achievement measure, which would be redundant with what grades are. But it’s certainly not an IQ test…. It’s far from it…. It’s much more developed reasoning—the type of skills students develop over an extended period of time. (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/views.html)

Perhaps. But what a number of experts believe is that the only thing the test measures is your ability to take the test. And we here at SAT Speed Prep can certainly teach you to do that.

The SAT Information and tips posts on The Fastlane are written by Donna Lack, The Chief of the Pit Crew and Education Director for Speed Prep, LLC.

Today seventeen year old Zac Sunderland has become the youngest person to sail around the world solo.

At a press conference on his return he said that society puts young people in a box, not expecting much of them, but that there is so much more that people can accomplish with the right motivation.   There really is no reason for anyone to NOT acheive their goals and dreams.  The only thing standing in the way, for most people, is an expectation that they can’t or won’t be successful.  Stay tuned for ways to overcome this common misconception.

You can hear Zac’s story here: http://su.pr/9qRFAA

I have always been interested in how people develop a successful way of thinking and why some people excel in everything they do while others seem to struggle.  On this blog I will be exploring different paths to success, as they relate to our students, while I investigate and learn more about developing a successful mindset.

Once you accomplish your goal of scoring high on the SAT you’ll be ready to focus on getting into the college of your choice, your future educational goals and perhaps your future career goals. The purpose of The Fastlane is to give you tips for success in all aspects of your life, in addition to SAT tips and advice.

Whether your personal hero is a sports figure, politician, business-person, movie star, rock star, scientist or teacher all successful people share a common trait, a laser-like focus on achieving their goals.  Not just long term goals but day-to-day and even hour-by-hour goals.  In the coming weeks we’ll be talking about goal setting, focus and concentration, a positive mental attitude and a successful mind set. I hope you’ll join us as we examine ideas, practices and habits that will allow you to accomplish your own personal track record in life’s Fastlane.

Feel free to contact me with any suggestions or questions you may have.

The Successful Thinking posts on The Fastlane are written by Steve Lack, The Head Mechanic on the Pit Crew, site administrator of SATSpeedPrep.com and Director of Development for Speed Prep, LLC.